Isle of Hope

My Mister and I inherited some tickets to the Celtic Woman concert on Saturday night, it was an evening of beautiful music (although I have to laugh at how people cheered when they started singing "Oh Danny Boy", you would have thought Dave Matthews had just launched in to "Satelite" or something...).

One song, I found particularly touching, in light of our current immigration issues:

Isle of Hope

On the first day on January, 1892,
They opened Ellis Island
And they let the people through
And the first to cross the threshold
Of that isle of hope and tears,
Was Annie Moore from Ireland
Who was all of fifteen years

Isle of hope, isle of tears,
Isle of freedom, isle of fears,
But it's not the isle you left behind
That isle of hunger, isle of pain,
Isle you'll never see again
But the isle of home is always on your mind

In a little bag she carried
All her past and history,
And her dreams for the future
In the land of liberty

And courage is the passport
When your old world disappears
But there's no future in the past
When you're fifteen years

Isle of hope, isle of tears,
Isle of freedom, isle of fears,
But it's not the isle you left behind
That isle of hunger, isle of pain,
Isle you'll never see again
But the isle of home is always on your mind

When they closed down Ellis Island
In nineteen forty-three,
Seventeen million people
Had come there for sanctuary
And in Springtime when I came here
And I stepped onto it's piers,
I thought of how it must have been
When you're fifteen years

The thought of a young teenage girl leaving her home and traveling by boat all the way to the US, to escape the hunger and desperation of a country plagued by the potato famine and religious and political violence, arriving in a country full of opportunity and challenges, makes me think of all the people who face starvation or violence in their home countries today, and who want more for their children.  There are many arguments surrounding immigration, but I think that they're just excuses for the fear we feel over cultures we don't understand.  There is no US culture.  We're made up of people who came here from all over the world, and we should embrace the unique cultures brought by new immigrants.  If there are concerns surrounding immigration, we should address those directly instead of passing laws to make the lives of immigrants more difficult and more dangerous.